In the race for next year’s Republican presidential nomination, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz have made media bias an issue, as did Newt Gingrich during the 2012 contest. Irony alert: Martin Longman believes that it was one of the media’s favorite GOPers, John McCain, who planted the seeds for such press-bashing when he chose his  running mate.

Longman contended in a Wednesday post that “something broke on the right when they were forced to spend September and October of 2008 pretending that it would be okay if Sarah Palin were elected vice-president. The only way to maintain that stance was to jettison all the normal standards we have for holding such a high office. But it also entailed simply insisting that the truth doesn’t matter…Seven years down the road, it’s gotten to the point that Republicans have realized that they can say anything they want and just blame media bias if anyone calls them on their lies.”

Republicans have the upper hand in Congress and in a clear majority of state governments. To Alterman, that state of affairs is a “mystery,” since GOPers typically hold “extreme” and “silly” views “that are not only beyond the boundaries of the beliefs of the vast majority of Americans, but also contrary to the laws of physics, economics, and, of course, common sense.”

In the December 7 issue of the magazine, Alterman analyzes how Republicans can be so nutty yet so empowered. He blames 1) Democrats, for “allow[ing] themselves to be defined as elitist snobs who view the everyday struggles of working-class Americans—especially white males—with contempt,” and 2) “so many members of the mainstream media [who have] run interference for—and therefore legitimize[d]—the [GOP’s] dangerous nonsense in the guise of allegedly objective reporting.”

The left tends to believe that Republicans, for whatever reason, are a lot better than Democrats at messaging and salesmanship. In that vein, Martin Longman argues that GOPers have a flair for fabricating issues -- “non-problems,” Longman calls them -- which distract the public from real problems.

“There was the non-problem with Fast & Furious,” wrote Longman in a Friday post. “There was the non-problem of professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Shirley Sherrod and Solyndra and ACORN and in-person voter fraud and the IRS and the so-called Benghazi cover-up and the Ebola panic and now Syrian refugees…We seem to be living in a political world that is driven less by problems than non-problems that the Republicans have dreamed up or trumped up.”

Almost two years ago, in an interview with The New Yorker’s David Remnick, President Obama drew one of the worst sports-related analogies ever when he likened ISIS to a JV team. Last month, Obama sat for an interview with an actual sportswriter, Bill Simmons, who pretty much pitched batting practice, thereby minimizing the chance of presidential gaffes, sporting or otherwise. The Q&A appears in the new issue of GQ.

Simmons, the former ESPN and Grantland personality who’s developing a show for HBO, set the highly deferential tone in his introduction, declaring that Obama “carries himself like Roger Federer, a merciless competitor who keeps coming and coming, only there’s a serenity about him that disarms just about everyone…He casually compared himself to Aaron Rodgers, and he wasn’t bragging. Obama identified with Rodgers’s ability to keep his focus downfield despite all the chaos happening in front of him. That’s Obama’s enduring quality, and (to borrow another sports term) this has been his ‘career year.’”

Many on the left have accused conservatives of exploiting the Paris terrorist attacks for political gain. On Monday, Daily Kos founder and publisher Markos Moulitsas jumped on the pile, alleging that the right’s main reaction to the attacks was not sadness or outrage, but “excitement” over the prospect of stirring up Islamophobia -- perhaps to the point of getting the Middle East war that they supposedly want so much.

“Finally! An excuse to wield their favorite tool—fear!” wrote Kos. “Because if there’s one sentiment that defines conservative ideology, it’s fear. Fear of the blacks, the communists, the immigrants, the liberal college professors, the Mexican rapist/drug dealers, the sleeper cells hiding amidst Syrian refugees…This is a movement that can’t speak to people’s economic plight, but it sure can rail about the monsters under the bed!”

The war of words between Bill O’Reilly and George Will over the long-term effects on Ronald Reagan of the 1981 assassination attempt amounts to a loose thread that could eventually cause the unraveling of conservatism, argued Sean Illing in a Friday article.

Illing opined that “conservatism, as a governing philosophy, continues to resonate because of Reagan’s perceived success” -- “perceived” being the operative word, since Illing went on to argue that “Reagan’s policies…made government more bloated, more defense-oriented, more oligarchic, and less democratic. Conservatives never reckon with these facts because the ahistorical canonization of Reagan prevents them from doing so.”

Robin Williams’s first album was called Reality…What a Concept. More than one lefty blogger implied that Unreality…What a Concept would have been a fitting title for Tuesday night’s Republican presidential debate.

Many products long not advertised on television now are commonly promoted during ad breaks. Writer Danielle Campoamor would like to add one more type of commercial to that list.

“Why is it that I never see an ad for abortion services?” wondered Campoamor in a Sunday piece. “Why are we willing to use women’s bodies in ads, but rarely see ads that would benefit women’s bodies?...Society has manipulated abortion and the way in which it is viewed, changing it from a medical procedure to an exhausted topic of debate.”

The heyday of patent medicine, medicine shows, and related phenomena has been over for more than a century, right? Yes and no, implied Esquire's Pierce in a Thursday post. While it’s true that (for example) Coca-Cola no longer is sold as a cure for impotence, political snake oil, Pierce asserted, has become the chief product of the Republican party.

Pierce’s peg was Ben Carson’s involvement with Mannatech, but as far as the GOP angle was concerned, “the process began with Ronald Reagan, the greatest patent-medicine salesman of them all. It was he who marketed the economic snake-oil with a wink and a smile…It was he who gulled the country with tales of Sandinistas driving jeeps across the Rio Grande, and dangerous Cuban adventurism in Grenada, while Marines were being slaughtered in their barracks. He was the best show in town.”